Cold (39 page)

An Arctic Boat Journey: In the Autumn of
1854 (1871, James A. Osgood and Co., Boston), by Isaac I. Hayes, was republished in 2007 by Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish,
MT). Kessinger Publishing digitizes rare books, including many about the Arctic. Also available at
www.archive.org/details/arcticboat00hayerich
.

Fridtjof Nansen’s
Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship
Fram 1893–1896,
and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lt. Johansen
was originally published in Norwegian in 1897. It has since been republished many times, including a 2008 version published
by Skyhorse Publishing (New York) under the title
Farthest North: The Epic Adventure of a Visionary Explorer
. The
Fram
is a ship with an amazing history. It has been preserved at the Frammuseet, or Museum of the
Fram,
on Bygdøy Island in Oslo, Norway.

For photographs and a history of the permafrost tunnel, see
www.crrel.usace.army.mil/permafrosttunnel/
. Although the tunnel is not open to the public, tours are sometimes arranged for visiting students, engineers, and scientists.
An admirable technical paper titled “Syngenetic Permafrost Growth: Cryostratigraphic Observations from the CRREL Tunnel Near
Fairbanks, Alaska,” by Y. Shur, H. M. French, T. Bray, and D. A. Anderson (2004,
Permafrost and Periglacial Processes,
vol. 15, pp. 339–47), gives detailed descriptions of the permafrost tunnel’s features.

Permafrost is usually defined as ground that remains at temperatures below thirty-two degrees for two years or longer. Ice
may or may not be present. For example, dry bedrock in the far north may not contain ice. The permafrost zone is often divided
into “continuous permafrost” and “discontinuous permafrost,” and sometimes further divided into “intermittent” and “sporadic.”

The steppe bison recovered near Fairbanks was dubbed Blue Babe after Paul Bunyan’s ox because specks of blue iron phosphate
(vivianite) dotted its skin. It was preserved through the efforts of Dale Guthrie and remains on display at the University
of Alaska’s museum in Fairbanks. For a more detailed description, see Mary Lee Guthrie’s well-illustrated
Blue Babe: The Story of a Steppe Bison Mummy from Ice Age Alaska
(1988, White Mammoth, Fairbanks).

We are accustomed to the properties of water through everyday experiences, but water is an amazing compound. Water is the
only nonmetallic substance known to expand when it freezes. Volume increases by about nine percent when water freezes and
then decreases slightly as the temperature drops further. Marianna Gosnell celebrates the properties of water in her book
Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance
(2005, Alfred P. Knopf, New York).

Taiki Katayama and a number of coauthors (Michiko Tanaka, Jun Moriizumi, Toshio Nakamura, Anatoli Brouchkov, Thomas Douglas,
Masami Fukuda, Fusao Tomita, and Kozo Asano) described growth of bacteria from an ice wedge in the permafrost tunnel in an
article called “Phylogenetic Analysis of Bacteria Preserved in a Permafrost Ice Wedge for 25,000 Years” (2007,
Applied and Environmental Microbiology,
vol. 73, pp. 2360–63). They wrote, “Our results suggest that the bacteria in the ice wedge adapted to the frozen conditions
have survived for 25,000 years.”

No one should visit Fairbanks without reading Terrence Cole’s engaging history of early mining,
Crooked Past: The History of a Frontier Mining Camp; Fairbanks, Alaska
(1991, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks).

Between 1979 and 2002, 16,555 hypothermia fatalities were reported in the United States, with Alaska, New Mexico, North Dakota,
and Montana having the highest number of hypothermia deaths in 2002. Most of these victims died before they could be treated.
The number of victims who die from rewarming shock is not known.

Mechem’s article called “Frostbite,” available at
www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic209.htm
, is intended as a quick reference for medical professionals, but it includes information sure to interest anyone who travels
in cold regions. It also includes interesting photographs of badly frostbitten hands, ears, and feet.

The article “Modified Cave Entrances: Thermal Effect on Body Mass and Resulting Decline of Endangered Indiana Bats (
Myotis sodalist
),” by A. R. Richter, S. R. Humphrey, J. B. Cope, and V. Brack, appeared in the academic journal
Conservation Biology
(1993, vol. 7, pp. 407–15). Anyone who has spent time in caves will intuitively understand that modifying entrances will
change airflow and, subsequently, underground climates.

As Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s 1938 book
Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure
(reprint, 2003, Island Press, Washington, DC) progresses, the battle with carbon monoxide poisoning and its effect on his
mind becomes increasingly important.

Frederick Albert Cook’s description of his meal on the pole, from his 1913 book
My Attainment of the Pole
(Mitchell Kennedy, New York), will ring true to anyone who has spent enough time in the backcountry to begin losing significant
amounts of body fat. On long backcountry trips, one often spends the first few days feeling pleasantly tired but easily satiated,
but as body fat disappears, one gradually begins to feel almost constant hunger, even after a large meal.

Part of Captain George E. Tyson’s 1871 book
Tyson’s Wonderful Drift
was reprinted in the collection
Ring of Ice: True Tales of Adventure, Exploration, and Arctic Life
(2000, Lyons Press, New York).

In their 1941 book
Kabloona: Among the Inuit,
reprinted as part of the Graywolf Rediscovery Series (1996, Graywolf Press, St. Paul), Gontran De Poncins and Lewis Galantiere
suggest that consumption of frozen fish will keep one warm in cold climates. More commonly among the Alaskan Inupiat, walrus
meat is said to have this property.

Bernd Heinrich’s
Mind of the Raven
and
Ravens in Winter
are perhaps better known than his equally delightful book on winter ecology,
Winter World
(2003, HarperCollins, New York). Heinrich’s quotations here are from
Winter World,
a book that should be read and reread by anyone living in a cold climate.

SEPTEMBER

The quotations and some of the background information on the Little Ice Age are from Brian Fagan’s interesting book
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Change Made History,
1300–1850 (2000, Basic Books, New York). This book, more than any other, brings home the reality of even relatively minor
changes in climate and reminds us that climate variability and predictability are as important as or more important than temperature
itself. Additional information on the Little Ice Age can be found in dozens of books and articles.

The English vicar’s quotation is from Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel’s
Volcano Weather: The Story of
1816
, the Year Without a Summer
(1983, Seven Seas Press, Newport, RI), which explains the difficulties surrounding the association of cold weather with volcanic
eruptions.

Confusion surrounding the Pleistocene Ice Age is surprising. Also called the Quaternary glaciation and the Pleistocene glaciation,
it is sometimes defined as the period during which permanent ice sheets existed in Antarctica and possibly Greenland, with
fluctuating ice sheets and glaciers in other areas. During this period, temperatures fluctuated enough to allow large-scale
expansion and contraction of ice sheets, or glacial and interglacial periods. It seems that many people think of the Pleistocene
Ice Age incorrectly as equivalent to the Wisconsin glaciation, which lasted from about one hundred thousand years ago until
about ten thousand years ago. The Wisconsin glaciation was one name for one of at least four periods of Pleistocene glaciation.
The Pleistocene nominally ends, quite artificially, near the beginning of recorded human history, around ten thousand years
ago, at a time that corresponds with the beginning of the current interglacial period.

The Mayo Clinic provides an excellent description of Raynaud’s disease at
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/raynauds-disease/DS00433
. The disease afflicts five to ten percent of people. Women are five times more likely than men to suffer from Raynaud’s disease.

Darwin’s comment lamenting his failure to spot obvious signs of past glaciation comes from
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
which has been republished many times, including in 1993 (W. W. Norton, New York). Even today, people trained in periglacial
geology are far more adept at spotting signs of previous glaciation than those with only a passing knowledge of the topic.

Doug Macdougall’s
Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages
(2004, University of California Press, Berkeley) gives an insightful and readable history of ice ages, including the history
of the science of ice ages, with well-deserved emphasis on Agassiz.

An electronic copy of James Croll’s 1875 book
Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations: A Theory of Secular Changes of the Earth’s Climate
(Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh) is available at
http://books.google.com/books?id=Q98PAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=croll#PPP2,M1
.

As recently as forty years ago, before the reality of global warming was widely recognized, serious scientists pondered the
problem of the end of the current interglacial period and renewed cooling. Plans for preventing the return to a glacial period
were discussed in earnest, including the possibility of intentionally scattering coal dust on the ice caps to melt the ice
and end the reflection of heat back into space. An April 28, 1975, article in
Newsweek
described “a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and
1968” and reported on “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change.” These discussions and the media
attention they drew undoubtedly delayed the acceptance of data suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to
warmer temperatures.

It is often possible in Alaska to see the evidence of recent Pleistocene glaciation confounded by the evidence of older Pleistocene
glaciation. It can be amusing to listen to scientists debate glaciation patterns in the field based on evidence they can observe
from the edge of the road. They often use words such as “obvious” and “self-apparent” as they contradict one another’s ideas.
The further back one goes in time, the more speculative and obscure the evidence becomes.

Gabrielle Walker’s wonderful
Snowball Earth: The History of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know
It
(2003, Three Rivers Press, New York) explains the scientific and human history of the Snowball Earth theory and provides
a nice sketch of Paul Hoffman.

Paul K. Feyerabend’s
Against Method
(1993, Verso, London) argues that the strength of personalities may be as important as data to the successful advancement
of scientific ideas.

OCTOBER

The description of the job opportunity was reported in “NASA Offers $5000 a Month for You to Lie in Bed,” by Alexis Madrigal
(May 7, 2008,
Wired Science,
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/nasa-offers-500.html
).

Much of the discussion of hibernation and other aspects of winter ecology stems from work described in Bernd Heinrich’s
Winter World
(2003, HarperCollins, New York). Additional excellent information on hibernation and other winter adaptations comes from
Peter Marchand’s
Life in the Cold
(1996, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH) and James Halfpenny and Roy Ozanne’s
Winter: An Ecological Handbook
(1989, Johnson Books, Boulder, CO).

Today technical publications on ecological studies are almost without exception steeped in complex statistical analyses, but
Edmund Jaeger’s “Further Observations on the Hibernation of the Poor-Will” (1949,
Condor,
vol. 51, pp. 105–9) provides an example of the sort of natural history that was the foundation of the science of ecology
— hard-won observations from the field backed up by orderly thinking.

The two University of Minnesota researchers were J. R. Tester and W. J. Breckenridge. They described their work in a 1964
article titled “Winter Behavior Patterns of the Manitoba Toad,
Bufo hemiphrys,
in Northwestern Minnesota” (
Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae,
series A. IV,
Biologica,
vol. 71, pp. 424–31). One cannot help but wonder what their families and nonbiologist friends thought when the two researchers
explained that they were tracking toads, but biologists often find themselves explaining their work to incredulous nonspecialists.

John Burroughs’s description of his discovery of a hibernaculum comes from his 1886 book chapter “A Sharp Lookout,” which
is available online at
http://kellscraft.com/Burroughs,John/SignsandSeasons/SignsandSeasonsCh01.html
. The full book,
Signs and Seasons,
was published by Riverside Press (Cambridge, MA).

William Schmid’s work was published in 1982 as “Survival of Frogs in Low Temperature” in the prestigious journal
Science
(vol. 215, pp. 697–98). Among other things, Schmid’s article says that higher levels of glycerol during winter are related
to frost tolerance. One wonders what the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs would have thought about in-depth physiological
work on frozen frogs.

The passage from Lynn Rogers’s “A Bear in Its Lair” (October 1981,
Natural History,
pp. 64–70) describing his bear den encounter has been reprinted in full and in part many times. Although Rogers eloquently
describes his experience, many bear biologists have similar stories. They work casually with large and potentially dangerous
animals and are occasionally reminded of their own mortality.